About Us

“PBN understands that power within low-income communities isn’t indigenous to a certain kind of community. It’s possible in all communities. Pushback is making connections across all regions of this country which is the key to bridging the gap between state movements and a national progressive movement.”– Scott Douglass, Greater Birmingham Ministries

What is Pushback Network?

Pushback Network (PBN) began in 2005 as a dialogue among experienced, independent community-based groups. PBN’s founders were leaders of organizations that had built long-term, on-the-ground operations within the most challenging social environments in the country. They formed PBN to “push back” against what they considered to be shortsighted, tactical approaches to community organizing and electoral work.

PBN connects the infrastructures of well-established, high-performance community organizing groups from across the country to achieve a breakthrough in civic participation. Each state in the Network is lead by anchor organizations which guide strategic planning and coordinate the development of broad-based alliances of on-the-ground, grassroots workers, activists and ordinary residents committed to change.

Pushback is committed to revitalizing our democracy through the use of well-considered, state-based, grassroots driven strategies that are tested for accountability and freely shared and tailored to suit their environment. We build on decades of community organizing where networks and organizations are grown from local organizing, to regional campaigns, to emerging state formations.

PBN truly represents a bottom up approach to building power. It is a unique experiment in achieving both new levels of scale and strategic coherency in expanding local, state, and national arenas. Where the core ingredients of our model – indigenous anchor organizations taking the lead, centering civic engagement work in underrepresented communities, integrating that work with ongoing community organizing, and focusing on building state alliances from the bottom up – meet sufficient resources, dynamic and unique contributions are made to our goal of changing the composition and participation of the electorate and adding powerful voices of influence from the grassroots.

“No one group or state could do the work alone.”
– Sondra Youdelman, Community Voices Heard